The former party of Lincoln has moved one tea-bag closer to hunkering down in the far right wing of their survival bunker and armory. Sara “Partial-Term-Gubernatorial-Abortion” Palin gave a speech where she was bragging that the Republican party has devolved further from the simple five-year-old-tantrum style “Party of No” to the more intentionally intransigent “Party of Hell No!”

It’s not like it was that far of a journey though. The “Hell No” is frankly far more succinct than the multitude of other labels the Republicans have been dragging around in their carpet bags since the age of Reagan.

I don’t know if the people read their email messages before they forward it on to me, but every so often I get passed on a “funny” email that is especially conservatively partisan/racist. For example I received one titled “The World’s Shortest Books” that contained these comedic gems:

NEGROS I’VE MET WHILE YACHTING By Tiger Woods

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY COUNTRY By Jane Fonda & Cindy Sheehan.
Illustrated by Michael Moore

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BILL By Hillary Clinton

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HILLARY By Bill Clinton

You get the idea. I was sufficiently annoyed so I replied with my own list of World’s Shortest Books that were egregiously omitted from the original list.

HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL PRESIDENT (IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM)
By George W. Bush

HUNTING AND GUN SAFETY
By Dick Cheney

MILITARY PLANNING (AND HOW NOT TO CHERRY PICK INTELLIGENCE TO FIT YOUR PREDETERMINED NARRATIVE)
By Donald Rumsfeld

PRESERVING THE CONSTITUTION AND PERSONAL PRIVACY RIGHTS
By Alberto Gonzales

PUBLIC BATHROOM ETIQUETTE
By Larry Craig

HURRICANE RECOVERY AND DISASTER MANAGEMENT
By Micheal “Brownie” Brown

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR AROUND CONGRESSIONAL PAGES (OR HOW NOT TO RAPE YOUNG BOYS)
By Mark Foley

FAMILY VALUES (OR HOW TO AVOID BEING CAUGHT WEARING DIAPERS WITH A D.C. MADAM)
By David Vitter

If you have any others I might have missed please feel free to add them to the list in the comments section.

Alas, back in the reign of George Bush, he awarded the coveted Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. Did he give it to a scientist or other great intellectual thinker? No. To someone who saved lives or helped find a cure for a horrible disease? No. To anyone of admirable irreproachable honor and integrity? Fuck no. He gave it to former CIA Director George J. Tenet, former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer III and retired Gen. Tommy Franks…because they were some of the leading douche bags that made his contemptibly ill conceived and criminally ineptly executed war in Iraq possible.

Steven Hawking could kick your ass with his mind

Compare, if you will, to the awarding of the same medal today by President Obama. Among others this president gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to world class theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Archbishop Desmond Tutu received a medal. Geneticist Janet Davison Rowley, whose studies of chromosome abnormalities in human leukemia and lymphoma have led to dramatically improved survival rates for previously incurable cancers, was honored. Also receiving a medal was economist Muhammad Yunus who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 to provide microloans to the poor.

Just a little different isn’t it? It’s kinda nice to see someone with a little integrity in the White House again isn’t it?

I’m no fan of gratuitous violence, especially when it’s handed out in a glaringly one sided broken-bottle-to-the-throat assault. But every once in a while it can be a thing of complete and utter beauty. Tonight I beg you to behold the full up to the elbow reaming Matt Taibbi administers to Evan Newmark (WSJ) for suggesting that it is time to declare Hank Paulson “a national hero”.

…
Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a “national hero” — in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don’t see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards’ boots. I can’t even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero? Are you fucking kidding us?

…

Thanks in large part to Paulson’s leadership in his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG — which owed Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September — had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he allowed one of Goldman’s last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse, Goldman didn’t have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to essentially bail out his own fuckups. I mean, that’s heroism if I’ve ever seen it. Audie Murphy has nothing on that. Sit your asses back down, Harriet Tubman, Thomas More, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. Hank Paulson is in the house!
…

I can almost smell the blood on the concrete from here. Go read it and bask in the glory of a proper (and well deserved) smack down.

Shepard Smith of Fox News mocks the crap out of Princess Douchenozzle Glenn Beck. It’s kinda awesome. Shepard has been a singular voice of average sanity on Fox. I’m pretty sure MSNBC has a desk all warmed up for him if he manages to get himself fired. I’m just saying.